Just the Stats

Years ago when I began editing Servant Magazine for Prairie College, I decided to run a short column of interesting facts. Here is a sampling.

• In a room of just 60 people, the probability that two of them share the same birthday is 99%.
• If you spend just one minute brushing your teeth each day, you will spend 852 hours brushing those teeth during a 70-year lifespan.
• One out of every 2,000-3,000 babies is born with a tooth.
• One technology survey found that 8% of people believe that Wi-Fi is pronounced “wiffy.”
• The average human will grow 590 miles of hair in their lifetime.
• If you shuffle a pack of cards properly, chances are that exact order has never been seen in the history of the world.
• Dung beetles can use the Milky Way to navigate.
• If you unraveled all the DNA in your body, it would span 34 billion miles, reaching to Pluto (2.66 billion miles away) and back six times. Wow, we are fearfully and wonderfully made!
• The Bible is the world’s most popular book. More than 6 billion copies have been printed and over 100 million copies are sold each year. The Bible has been translated in whole or in part into 3,223 languages. In contrast, the UN Declaration of human rights has been translated into 462 languages, the Quran 164, the Book of Mormon 110, and the Harry Potter books 80.

Experts claim that more than half of the Bible’s 6,000 plus prophesies have been fulfilled. What is most striking is how accurately the prophesies concerning Jesus have been fulfilled. That He would be born in Bethlehem, descended from King David, betrayed by His friend for 30 pieces of silver, His executers would gamble for His clothing, etc. In the book Science Speaks, Peter Stoner and Robert Newman say the statistical probability of one man fulfilling just eight of these prophesies is 1 in 10-followed by 17 zeros. To put that in perspective, if you took 1017 silver dollars and placed them on the state of Texas, they would cover the entire state two feet deep.

Remember my statistic about brushing your teeth? If we spent as much time reading the Bible as we did brushing our teeth, we could read this book 12 times in our lifetime. And if used the time we spent waiting in lines to read it, we could read the Bible from cover to cover 620 times. So go ahead, get creative, and read God’s Word today.